99 Days of Freedom Experiment- Quit Facebook and report happiness

Would you be happier if you were off of Facebook? This Dutch nonprofit initiative has created a website, 99 days of freedom, and is asking people to try their own experiment.

My own kids left FB years ago. On their own. They felt like the fights, the gossip and the drama was not worth it. All three of them say they are quite happy to not be on Facebook. Most of their friends are not on anymore either. The young people who still use it, tell me it for family and to keep in touch with their grandparents and family. How they use it has changed dramatically. The young people I am speaking with are college age and high school. Most of them use Instagram and snapchat to communicate now. Facebook paid one billion dollars for Instagram in 2012, so they found a way to get back and keep those kids who have migrated to Instagram.

Do you ever wonder what life is like without Facebook?In response to Facebook’s controversial mood experiment involving some 700,000 unwitting users, we present you 99 Days of Freedom; an online study on how life without Facebook impacts user happiness. Joining is very simple: follow our three step instruction to join the experiment for as long as you like. We can’t wait to hear how you spend your time off.Visit the website here.

The “99 Days of Freedom” initiative was dreamed up by employees at Just B.V., a creative agency in the Netherlands. It started as an office joke.

“Like a lot of Facebook users, many of us were bothered by reports of secret mood experiments,” Just’s art director, Merijn Straathof, said in a press release. “As we discussed it internally, we noted an interesting tendency: To a person, everyone had at least a ‘complicated’ relationship with Facebook. Whether it was being tagged in unflattering photos, getting into arguments with other users or simply regretting time lost through excessive use, there was a surprising degree of negative sentiment. Then someone joked, ‘I guess that the real question is, ‘How do you feel when you don’t use Facebook?’ There was group laughter, followed by, ‘Wait a second. That’s a really good question!”

Just chose 99 days because it thought users would lose interest if the campaign ran longer and it would be hard to measure emotional change if it was shorter. Straathof stressed the goal isn’t to protest Facebook or undermine its business. “Facebook is an incredible platform, we’re all fiercely loyal users and we believe that there’s a lot to love about the service,” he said.

As of early Friday morning, more than 6,000 people had signed up for the campaign, which was announced on Wednesday. That’s barely a drop in Facebook’s billion-user bucket.

Even if the campaign called for leaving Facebook altogether, would it work? Cornell University conducted a survey which it published in 2013 showing a quarter of Facebook users take breaks from the site by deactivating their account, and one in 10 completely quit. The survey was based on responses from 410 people – not exactly representative of Facebook’s much larger user base.

However there were some interesting results. The researchers found that Facebook users who deactivate their account are more likely to know someone else who has also deactivated – perhaps a sign that if enough people get mad at Facebook, a mass exodus could occur.

But mass exodus would mean overcoming the network effect. That would be tough. People might be mad at Facebook, but it’s still the site people use to catch up with friends and family. You can’t just leave it for another site because your friends aren’t on another site – they’re on Facebook. Even if you quit Facebook, you might be using another network it owns like Instagram or What’s App.

But plenty of alternative social networks are out there – some popping up just in time to capitalize on anti-Facebook rage. Sobrr is one such Facebook alternative. In a way, it’s the anti-Facebook. Instead of tracking everything you do, the site erases everything every 24 hours.

Erasing everything is a promise we’ve heard before. Remember Snapchat’s supposed commitment to privacy? Users were told photos and videos sent through the app would disappear within ten seconds, but it turned out they were being saved without users’ knowledge.

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